After seeing what has gone on with the video game industry for the past 5 years or so, I can safely say that not one of them is going to get any of my money prior to actually having a semi-working product on the shelf at Target or on Steam.

Or at least a semi-working product you can actually see and/or play with. These designdoc beggars we see now can diaf.

"See, the beauty of webgames is that I can play them on my phone while I'm plowing your mom." -Samwise

One such attempt appears to have been the game Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men. Ostensibly the work of Little Monster Productions, the game was described as an action and strategy-based RPG that was being created by a team of 12 "industry veterans," some of them allegedly former Blizzard and Activision employees. The project had raised almost $5,000 of its $80,000 goal before users from a number of different online communities, including Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Reddit, noticed several problems: the artwork had been cribbed from outside sources, the photos of the company's purported offices had been lifted from another site, and even the game's poster art was a mash-up.

After seeing what has gone on with the video game industry for the past 5 years or so, I can safely say that not one of them is going to get any of my money prior to actually having a semi-working product on the shelf at Target or on Steam.

Or at least a semi-working product you can actually see and/or play with. These designdoc beggars we see now can diaf.

Some of the much smaller scale gamesdev projects actually have gone that way -- showing off a plan, a gameplay video, and a downloadable prototype to see what they've done so far. Which seems like a much saner point to fund something at (though certainly not entirely without risk).

tl;dr Guy rips off a bunch of assets and makes up a phony story about being ex Blacktivision devs making a game. Asks for 80k. The investigative journalists over at SA find him/them out. KS pulled after raising a couple grand.

If the pebble was android based or even had it's own on board music player I would be all over it. I wonder how epaper works with a stop watch, guessing you don't get to see those hundredths of a second fly by in real time.

1) This campaign is for two new adventure games from Jane Jensen, the creator behind Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter adventure games (as well as King's Quest VI).

2) Jane and her husband, composer Robert Holmes, are starting a new studio called Pinkerton Road that will be solely focused on story-driven, 3rd person adventure games. The studio is based in Lancaster County, PA.

A security lapse at the popular crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com exposed more than 70,000 project ideas that weren't ready to be viewed.

The information that could be seen didn't include credit-card numbers or other sensitive personal details, but it could make users more wary of Kickstarter's data practices and lower their expectations of privacy on the site.

The lapse stemmed from a website update in late April, the company conceded on Sunday.

Kickstarter provides an online platform for users to raise money from friends and strangers for project-based creative endeavors, such as building a videogame, making a documentary or recording an album.

The company said, "The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects. No account or financial data was made accessible."

The company said it didn't yet know if many people beyond a Wall Street Reporter saw the nonpublic information, but believes the exposure was limited.

Kickstarter said it patched the security hole on Friday afternoon, after The Wall Street Journal began analyzing the exposed data.

"Obviously our users' data is incredibly important to us. Even though limited information was made accessible through this bug, it is completely unacceptable. We want to underline once again that zero account or financial information was at any time made accessible by this bug," Kickstarter said Sunday.

The information, while not visible to casual visitors, was reachable through a set of data feeds—together known as an application programming interface, or API.

Kickstarter processes all pledges through a third-party, Amazon Payments. The company says it never sees users' credit-card information.

The three-year-old Brooklyn-based company is a darling of the New York start-up scene. Last year, it was reported that Kickstarter had raised $10 million in venture-capital funding from high-profile investors. Among them were Union Square Ventures; Twitter co-founder and executive chairman Jack Dorsey; Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake; and Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kickstarter takes a 5% cut of the funds successfully raised through its site. In 2011, visitors pledged nearly $100 million to more than 27,000 projects. That dollar figure appears to be growing exponentially. This year Kickstarter boasted its first of several million-dollar projects, and its first $10 million project—for a smartphone-enabled watch named Pebble. But for every mega-success, there are hundreds of flops—and even more projects that never make it through the site's vetting process.

The Journal was able to download nearly 77,000 of Kickstarter's most recent projects and drafts, dating back to mid-March, before Kickstarter plugged the security hole around 1:40pm Eastern on Friday.

When told about the lapse, Kickstarter users whose draft projects were affected didn't seem particularly troubled. Sam Billen, a teacher and musician in Lawrence, Kan., had set a goal of $5,000 to help fund his first full-length album in three years. "I'd expect things like [the breach] to happen as they're growing," Mr. Billen said. "It's probably a one-time thing. But I think there are possibly some bigger projects out there where it might have been a bigger issue."

On April 27, Kickstarter touted its new home page in a blog. "Oh, and try to find the secret Easter Eggs hidden on the page," the company wrote, referring to the playful surprises that computer programmers often work into websites and video games. "Wink wink, nudge nudge."

I'm more interested in this vetting process than anything else. The fact that 70k+ projects were backlogged is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, especially since the site is more and more going on reputation rather than production to see who's worth their time. And when you've got $10m projects popping up with a 5% fee, I'd say it's perhaps time to hire more staff?

Btw, pebble is sold out. /sadface (I missed it)

« Last Edit: May 13, 2012, 10:25:28 PM by Ghambit »

"See, the beauty of webgames is that I can play them on my phone while I'm plowing your mom." -Samwise

I'm more interested in this vetting process than anything else. The fact that 70k+ projects were backlogged is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, especially since the site is more and more going on reputation rather than production to see who's worth their time. And when you've got 10m projects popping up with a 5% fee, I'd say it's perhaps time to hire more staff?

Btw, pebble is sold out. /sadface (I missed it)

Pebble is cool, but the having to have my phone anchored to me was a bit of a killer for me.

I'm more interested in this vetting process than anything else. The fact that 70k+ projects were backlogged is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, especially since the site is more and more going on reputation rather than production to see who's worth their time. And when you've got $10m projects popping up with a 5% fee, I'd say it's perhaps time to hire more staff?

Btw, pebble is sold out. /sadface (I missed it)

Well, they're manufacturing it to sell. It'll cost a bit more in retail, but the plus side is real hardware will be in peoples' hands by then and you'll know much better if the actual product lives up to the design. These guys definitely seem to know what they're doing (and have shipped consumer electronics before), so I'm pretty confident that people will actually get their pre-ordered devices, but things like fit, finish, battery life, stability, etc, are things you never know about for sure until it's all done and shipping...

A security lapse at the popular crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com exposed more than 70,000 project ideas that weren't ready to be viewed.

The information that could be seen didn't include credit-card numbers or other sensitive personal details, but it could make users more wary of Kickstarter's data practices and lower their expectations of privacy on the site.

Kickstarter does not directly accept any credit card information or otherwise from customers. That is all done through an external service (Amazon Payments). I hate it when writers can't be asked to do even the smallest amount of research. If credit card details had been exposed, the headline would've been "Amazon has done fucked up." Bleh.

I've randomly read the wall street journal for a long time now. It has been going further and further into straight shit at a very steady pace over the last several years. Murdoch buying it really just fucked the whole thing over.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

Great news ! Original team is all on board: they promised (we'll see) modding and a game absolutely true to its roots. And, like someone posted in the GoG thread, they're going to release the first two games throughout that service soon!